Introduction

Calico is a tool to create and use Android Content Providers in a simple manner. It is an object-relational mapping originally inspired by ActiveRecord from Ruby on Rails, but now very diverged because of the platform differences.

Content Providers are a useful tool whether or not you wish to share content with other applications, but the the amount of boilerplate code necessary to get one started is very off-putting. Once ready, cursors are a efficient way of accessing the content, but not very object-oriented. This library aims to deal with both these issues.

Quick Start

To be written, once the first release is out. :P

Development

If you want to contribute to the development, compile the library from source, or simply add Calico as a submodule to your project, read this section.

Submodules

This library depends in turn on other libraries. Some are included as git submodules; all those will be in the submodules directory.

After cloning the project, run git submodules sync and git submodules update to pull the sources of those modules.

Building dependencies

Calico library

The Calico library depends on the Android 2.3.3 SDK and the Android Compatibility package v4. It probably compiles with earlier versions of the SDK, I just build it against level 10.

Calico Android Unit tests

Same requirements as the library. Of course, it also depends on the library itself. All unit and integration tests are in the

Calico JUnit / Robolectric tests

To run tests, you need Robolectric and its dependencies. Everything you need should be available in the submodule directory. The order of the dependencies is important (i.e. JUnit4 should be before Android), the following one works:

1. Robolectric main libraries (submodules/robolectric/lib/main/*)
2. Robolectric test libraries (submodules/robolectric/lib/test/*)
3. Robolectric
4. Android SDK
5. Android Compatibility package v4
6. Calico sources

Note: Due to the low-level nature of testing Calico, Robolectric has proved less helpful than I had hoped. I've refactored most of the tests to Android Unit tests, and will continue this trend.

Robolectric

Robolectric is its own project, but its documentation is very much lacking. To build it the following dependency order works:

1. Robolectric main libraries (submodules/robolectric/lib/main/*)
2. Android SDK 2.3.3 with Google APIs (android-10)
3. Android Compatibility package v4
4. Java 1.6
5. Robolectric sources